(Corrie) wrote:

around the world, it became obvious that there's no escaping what
seems like mindless religion; in fact you see it all through recorded
history on every island, every out-of-the-way isolated space. It's
gotta be genetic.

PRECISELY my point. Humans are hard-coded to worship a Power greater
than themselves. That worship may be dreadfully misguided, but it is
ALWAYS there.

Maybe that's why Neanderthal (sp of my relative?) didn't make it. He
had no religion.


This was tongue-in-cheek, Cor. (I spell just like a Neanderthal, I
know) Guess I should've added a smiley here. But really, maybe his
religion didn't galvanize his buddies together as effectively as
Sapiens' did.



Neadertal. Most paleoanthropologists today think that they were
contemporaneous with early Homo Sapiens. May possibly have interbred
with them. IIRC there are genetic studies underway to see whether
that may have happened. (Of course, if they can interbreed, they're
not really separate species. At least that's one definition of
species. There are over a dozen others, several mutually exclusive.)
It's possible that that was the source of the "Nephilim" stories in
Genesis, as well as the "Titan" stories of Greco-Roman mythology. But
Neadertal were not ancestors of modern humans.

And I hate to correct you, but there is strong evidence that
Neandertal was aware of and interacted with the spiritual world. Grog
had religion.

By all means, correct me. Good one: Grog. :-) Guess his fertility
rock was no match for spear-chucking Zealots from afar.


No matter how hard you work at digging caves to hide from religious
morans, there's just no escaping the Crusades when they sweep through
your homeland.

Wow, you really ARE ignorant about history, aren't you? The Crusades
were, oh, a few TEN THOUSAND years after the last Neandertal died.
And the word is spelled, "moron" not "moran".

Pac sezs:

No, you're mistaken Corrie. I was not referring to the actual
Crusades of the Middle Ages. If you were a true student of history,
you would know that "religious crusades" are in the thousands, and
spread all through recorded time. We find evidence of smashed-in
skulls and religious burials all through Eurasia, the middle East,
Asia, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Africa etc. My tongue-in-cheek hypo,
about what really happened to Grog was supposed to make you laugh.
But my hypothesis that Homo Sapiens won out over the stronger
Neanderthal through the evolutionary technique of religious fervor is
entertaining, wouldn't you say? I think Corky is right that religion
is a mechanism of natural selection. (and yes, I agree with those who
say some inbreeding occurred in the same Phylum between "Grog" and
Sapiens.)

Now about "Moran." It's unfortunate you have deteriorated into a
spelling troll so quickly. But actually I'm glad you have attacked my
poor spelling. Here, Corrie, you illustrate exactly my point about
the fallacy of taking written text like the King James version of the
Bible so literally. If you where really knowledgeable about history,
you would know that the colloquial term "Moron" came from Al Capone's
1920's. And if you bother to read text from the period, you would find
the term used to be "Moran" with an "a-n" after the infamous mobster
John Moran, who, just couldn't put the dots together on a regular
basis.


Only way out is to have an even more ruthless religion that spends all their time developing bigger mind-controlling weapons.

What, pray tell, are the ruthless and mind-controlling aspects of the
Sermon on the Mount? On the other hand, you are *quite* right with
respect to secular humanism, with its weapon of the mind-controlling
prayer-free public school and the ruthlessly anti-religious liberal
university.

Most of us were brain-washed in Sunday School as adolescents Corrie.
Keeping religious displays out of schools is in keeping with the
governments' job of separating Church and State. Kids can still pray,
they just aren't allowed to disrupt others with religious displays
designed to pressure those of other faiths. If it's still too
upsetting to a Zealot parent, then you can put your kid in a private
monk school or something. It's about free choice. I don't want a
teacher to countermand the religious beliefs of our immigrants. It
used to be o.k. when a region was: all Puritan for example. It's
different now. Things had to change.

Thank God though as Adults we have an un-coerced choice. This
country was founded on the principles of Free Masons who believed in
religious tolerance above any traditional religion, which is IMHO one
of the biggest reasons why we have been so successful as a truly free
people.

For "Pollsters" who may be lurking, I do not desire to discuss this
with earthbound morANs over at alt.religion. So Corrie, Corky,
Oldcop, Bernie, others, feel free to comment here, or change my mind
about anything.

Enjoyed the banter,

pacplyer